Reads for the Road

Inspiration and Advice for Aspiring Athletes

By

Blythe Yee

Updated May 5, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

Mary Gadams has more than 50 endurance runs under her belt. But among her many marathons-and-longer, one race clearly stands out in her mind as the toughest: the Western States Endurance Run, a 161-kilometer run through California's Sierra Nevada mountains, which took her nearly 30 hours to complete in 1992. "I went in the shower and just collapsed" afterward, she recalls. But she did make it in to work the next day.

Her personal commitment to sports has become a professional one. In 1996, the former investment...